More About Disney’s New Shorts Program

From Business Week,this article offers a few new details about Disney’s shorts program. Among the tidbits:

* The budgets for these shorts are “$2million or less.”

* One of the six shorts in development, The Ballad of Nessie, is “partly an exercise in helping animators improve their skills at drawing fabric in a naturalistic way.”

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* Another interesting item from the article:

There’s even a piece of this new program that’s aimed at employees who don’t draw for a living. By joining the “Shorts Club,” anybody from a secretary to a tech help-desk employee can gain access to a computer workstation in their off-hours to make a five-minute cartoon. These likely won’t make it to a theater. But they could help get everybody in the organization excited about what they’re doing.

And what would a mainstream article about animation be without poor research and misinformation. The writer of this piece obviously has no concept of animation history when he writes, “In the 1930s, Walt Disney pioneered the animated short as a way of keeping his animators sharp while waiting for the script for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to finish.” Wow!

The Roger Rabbit shorts I worked on cost much more than that! Roller Coaster Rabbit cost 8 million, mostly because they changed directors on the short and had to start over. This short was the Florida studio’s first completed project.

I think it’s likely the reporter for this piece misunderstood accurate historic information and kind of mangled it as shown here. What would have made sense would be if he’d written:

“In the 1930s, preceeding the production of “Snow White”, Disney used some of his shorts as a training/testing ground for the much more sophisticated effects he wanted to get onscreen in his first feature”. That would have been true, although as far as which shorts were used in that way, “The Old Mill” is the only one I can remember reading about for certain–not sure if or what the others would have been.

Chris

Well the short, The Tortoise and the Hare, was the first one in which lipsync was done to such a high standard and it really set the bar animating dialogue.

John A

At 2 mil, we know they’ll animate the crap out of it. More important: is it actually going to be funny?

‘The Goddess of Spring’ was a short they produced to see how they would go about animating a realistic human female character, so I guess that could have been considered a testing ground for Snow White as well.

Mr. Semaj

One source said that the Mickey Mouse short, The Worm Turns, was a test for the special effects used when The Queen transformed into a Witch.